Building Skills Together: Hands-On Workshops with the Ladybugs Aachen

Remember that feeling when you finally understand something that seemed impossibly complex just moments before? That moment when code suddenly makes sense? At out community, we've been creating those moments together through our hands-on workshops <3 .

Our Workshop Adventures So Far

Over the past few months, our community has come together for some seriously cool workshops where we've gotten our hands dirty with code, broken things (and fixed them!), and learned tons along the way.

Flutter: Our first hands-on

We kicked things off with Anna Muzykina showing us the ropes with Flutter. We spent the workshop playing around with Flutter, and everyone was surprised by how quickly we could get apps up and running. Watching your code instantly appear on a phone screen? Pretty satisfying. Anna made it feel less like learning a framework and more like playing with really cool digital Legos.

Flutter Workshop @ Modell Aachen

Pair Programming: Better Together

Then came our pair programming workshop with Anita (one of our amazing organizers), plus Romana and Hui Ting, two of our most active members who always bring great energy to our events. This workshop was special because it wasn't just about coding: it was about coding together. We discovered that two brains really are better than one, and that debugging is way less frustrating when you have a partner to laugh with when you realize you've been missing a semicolon for the past 20 minutes.

CI/CD: Making Deployment Less Scary

DevOps can sound pretty intimidating. But when Olea and I ran our CI/CD workshop, we wanted to show everyone it's not rocket science. Olea gave us a super interesting intro to DevOps (finally understanding what all those buzzwords mean!), and then we actually deployed websites using GitHub and GitLab. There's something magical about pushing code and watching it go live automatically. By the end, everyone had their own deployed site and way more confidence about the whole DevOps thing.

TDD: Writing Tests First

Anita came back to lead a Test-Driven Development workshop that challenged how we usually think about coding. Writing tests before code? It sounds backwards, but once you try it, it actually makes so much sense. We practiced the red-green-refactor cycle, and while it felt weird at first, by the end everyone could see how it actually makes coding less stressful and you always know if your code works!

TDD Workshop @ DigiChurch Aachen

Coming Up: October & November

We've got two awesome workshops lined up that we're really excited about.

October: Let's Hack!

Yvonne, who works as a professional pentester, is going to show us the ropes of web security. This isn't going to be some boring lecture about passwords: we're actually going to hack things together (legally and ethically, of course). You'll learn to think like an attacker so you can build better defenses. How cool is that?

November: Making the Web Work for Everyone

In November, we're diving into frontend development with a focus on accessibility. The web should work for everyone, not just people with perfect vision using the latest MacBook. We'll explore practical ways to make our websites accessible, now more important than ever!

Join us!

We're here to learn, but also to have fun, make friends, and support each other. Many of our workshops are hands-on because we believe you learn best by doing. You need to type the code, break things, fix them, and high-five your neighbor when it finally works. If you live in Aachen (Germany) or even in the EU-Regio (Heerlen, Maastricht, Eupen…), you are welcome to our events <3

And yes, there will probably be snacks. There are always snacks.

Our next workshops are coming up fast: October's security workshop is going to be epic, and November's accessibility session will change how you think about web development.

Want to know more? Check out our website or find us on LinkedIn for all the details. We promise you'll learn something new, meet awesome people, and probably have more fun than you expected at a tech workshop.

See you there!